Categories
Life Politics

Empathy

HuffPost: I don’t know how to explain to someone why they should care about other people.

This article from 2017 captures my beliefs. Caring for our fellow man seems a natural thing to do. Why can’t everyone have a livable wage, a great free education, and the best health care in the world? These all seem totally doable in the United States of America.

If you had to work five jobs to get through university or suffer with broken bones and various injuries through your life why would you want that for others? Why wouldn’t you want your children to have it better?

We have big problems to solve. Let’s give the next generation a chance to do it.

Categories
Life

Our Winter Wonder Land

Categories
Cloud Life Social

On Parler and Amazon

AHHHHHH!It would appear Parler has the ACLU working to help them. Irony abounds!

The ACLUs assertion that Amazon “really owns the keys to the internet” is wrong.

Amazon, Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Apple, Twitter, and many, many, companies have built their own data centers so they don’t have a dependency on a single point of failure.

I know services like AWS and Azure make it easy to fire up services, but they’re not a requirement. Anyone who says they are is plain wrong.

Is it expensive to manage your own data center? Yes, it is. Can you manage your own data center? Yes, you can.

There are plenty of stories about services moving from AWS, and other setups, to their own infrastructure. It’s going to be difficult, for sure, but it’s not insurmountable.

The Parler folks are going to have to suck it up and build their own data center or find someone that’ll host their platform. Maybe Newsmax or OANN will lend them some space. I guess Gab has already offered.

If you want to play with the big boys, you have to bring your A-game, and the chops to run a data center.

Categories
Business Life Politics

Not a First Amendment Issue

Deadline: “They made an attempt to not only kill the app, but to actually destroy the entire company. And it’s not just these three companies. Every vendor from text message services to email providers to our lawyers all ditched us too on the same day.”

Parler hitched its wagon to a vile President’s rhetoric and what they deem free speech. Which is their choice, as a company, to make.

On the flip side all the other companies they chose to depend on for their services are free to choose not to host their content.

If Parler wants to continue to exist they’re free to build their own data center, purchase their own server, and connect them to the web. Google, Apple, and Amazon cannot keep you off the web. It’s open.

But they don’t have to support the hate of your platform.

Oh, I almost forgot. The First Amendment to the Constitution only applies to the Government infringing on your right to free speech. It doesn’t apply to private companies.

Categories
Life Politics

Coup

I had to write this down so I’d never forget what happened today.

Donald Trump supporters stormed the US Capitol today, durning the certification of the 2020 US Election.

Trump himself is responsible for the coup attempt. He held a rally in DC, riled his supporters up, and let them do their thing.

This is another dark mark on the United States of America.

On January 20, 2021, Joe Biden and Kamala Harris will become President and Vice President of our country. They have a real mess to cleanup.

Categories
Development Indie iOS Life Mac Weblogging Windows

Focus, Rob

It’s Christmas morning, early. The house is quiet but my brain is going crazy with thoughts of projects I should work on. The thing is, I don’t need any additional projects to work on.

AHHHHHH! When I decided to build Stream it was because I wanted to do something small. I had originally started building a blog editor that would post to WordPress and Tumblr. The core of the app was being written in C++ so I could share that core between iOS, macOS, and Windows apps. It was going to be a lot of work. More work than I had the time to invest.

So, I did my little app: Stream. That took over two years to complete. I spent a lot of time on the guts of the app. Mainly around discovery of feeds and parsing those feeds. As a result I have a decent set of code for dealing with RSS, Atom, JSON Feed, OPML, and HTML. It was a real joy to finally ship.

The bottom line is this, I’m slow. Couple that with limited time to work on stuff and it takes forever to complete a project.

This morning my brain is spinning on the idea of that blogging app. As much as I’d like to do it, I really do love blogging, it’s not the project I really need to pour my efforts into.

The project I need to work on is going to be a many year effort. It’s something I’ve wanted to do for at least 15-years. The target OS has changed and morphed over those years but the app idea hasn’t, and I’m getting help from a longtime friend who just happens to be a really great developer.

Focus, Rob. Focus.

Categories
Development Life

This is me

A wonderful boquet of flowers. No Jedi: “ I’ve noticed many times that a developer as senior as I am — now with 40 years writing code on Apple computers — is assumed by newer developers to be a kind of Jedi. As if I’m on intimate terms with every API in every framework; as if I’m deeply learned in every single tool, from Git to Jenkins to AppFigures; as if I know how to make App Store Connect sit up straight and mind its manners”

This is me. Every single day.

Categories
Government Life

Four long years

Jared Sinclair: “The plan was simple: wander until I encountered a bar. Any bar. It didn’t take long to stumble into one. Cramped inside, a handful of patrons. The horror show glared at us from the TV hanging under a drop-tile ceiling. Inescapable. What’re you gonna do.”

I recall the gut wrenching feeling I had that night when I realized we were going to be stuck with this clown for four long years. The next day I had to leave work because I was sick to my stomach. Yes, the election did it.

Heck, I was so confident I made a blog post predicting the outcome for Hillary Clinton. Not doing that again.

Categories
Life

If Charlottesville is always this wonderful in the fall, then fall would make the perfect summer. Cool mornings, highs in the 70s-80s, sunny.

It’s just beautiful here. 🍁🎃

Categories
Life Social

Why Curmudgeon Cafe?

I’ve setup a Mastodon instance called Curmudgeon Cafe. Why? Well, after creating a Mastodon account and learning more about it I really wanted to have my own instance, that’s why. It’s no big deal and was really easy to do using Masto.host. For five Euros a month I get a managed Mastodon instance and it was painless to setup. Now folks can find me @fahrni@curmudgeon.cafe on Mastodon.

The name Curmudgeon Cafe grew out of many conversations over the years with some old friends. I believe Christopher Hawkins once said we should have a Curmudgeon Conference and I know there have been many conversations between some of my old blogging friends about camping together — something we’ve never managed to pull off.

As a result my friends and I now have a Mastodon instance for us to play with.

If you’re interested in Mastodon please start off reading about it at Join Mastodon. It’s basically a federation of servers that behaves a lot like Twitter. In fact it’s so open and well defined Twitter could exist there as an instance among many instances.

Imagine that?